Kushal Das

FOSS and life. Kushal Das talks here.

kushal76uaid62oup5774umh654scnu5dwzh4u2534qxhcbi4wbab3ad.onion

Pony v0.2 released

I just released Pony v0.2 . It is still under constant development and will go some db changes before v1 release. Please delete .pony.db under your home before using the new release.

$rm ~/.pony.db

Viewing an Image

Among new features one can now see the EXIF information of an image.

Showing EXIF information

Deleting tag option is also added.

Showing tags

Get the source or rpms from here.

Now I have to add TODO file as too many things need to be fixed. If you have any suggestions please mail me or file a ticket.

Who wants a pony ?

If you want one you can grab from here.

Pony is a simple image manager written in PyKDE4.

pony

Few weeks back I lost my external hdd where I kept most of the photographs I took in last two year. It is kind of heartbreaking. But first thing came in my mind is not to get into this kind of situation again. So, decided to backup photos also in DVD(s).

But the problems started at the same time, if I do so, how can I figure out which photo is in which disk ? I know digikam is having a feature like this (to have external collections) but last time when I tried that it never worked. Though I am mostly a KDE user but I was using gthumb as image viewer except when I click on dolphin which opens up gwenview.

My workflow:

  1. Take photographs
  2. Copy them in hdd using File browser (Dolphin)
  3. View them using gthumb
  4. if required right and edit using gimp
  5. Upload the image to flickr

As I keep my photographs ordered in directories, gthumb is very helpful and I like the UI as it does not provide most of the fancy stuffs other image managers do.

After looking for few days I decided to write my own image manager which can suite properly with the simple workflow I follow.

The design goals:

  • It takes some amout of time to create thumbnails when the user visits a folder first time, but after that it stays fast as I really don't mind for the time on the first view. I tried with a folder which contained 13GB images.
  • Currently shows only jpeg images as we generally keep photos in that format
  • One can add tags to the images, currently no edit tag option is available
  • One can search based on tags (implemented), name or EXIF data or based on dates
  • Even if the file is in an external media it should show the thumbnail
  • It is having a flickr uploader. Currently it only adds title,tags,description. Photosets and privacy&safety will work in future releases
  • One should be able to add/edit/delete external medias as catalogs

Now this is a very basic form of the code base continously being hacked. Most of the planned stuffs still needs to be written. To get the thumbnails fast I kept them in db (still the db seems to be small ) and used a web framework based ORM to do so, yes it is Django :p. I know one may complain of this dependency but it is so nice that I couldn't leave it :)

MathStuf and Kevin_Kofler in #fedora-kde , #qt and Riddell ,pinotree, annma helped a lot to learn different pieces of KDE and Qt. nicubunu did extensive testing from the very beginning. Thank you guys for your support.

I still need to improve the UI so any help is welcome :)

Btw, the name of the project came as suggestion from sankarshan and mether.

Reliance NetConnect NetworkManager and data usage

As I moved into a new apartment I am using a Reliance NetConnect these days. It is having a 10GB data usage per month limit. I was looking for a way to keep the record data usage by this device. There are couple of applications which shows current usage very well, but they don't provide proper solution to record and query the usage records. So I started poking around nm-applet to find a way to record the data usage, Dan Williams helped a lot by reviewing the patch and we continously discussed to imporve in this area. Dan will probably make this feature available in future by NetworkManager codebase itself.

So, for the time being if you are using any mobile broadband device and want to track your usage record, I have patched versions of network-manager-applet available (patched against the latest svn trunk).

Download: the patch, NetworkManager srpm, F-10 rpm, F-11 rpm Dan is having a better verion of the patch here which I will put in a later release of the rpm.

Now this is a old version as of RPM release is considered. You have to remove your current NetworkManager-gnome package then install this new one. After that you have to relogin or reboot. To gather the data properly you have to "disconnect" through nm-applet only.

To view your usage use this python script. ./nm-data-usage will give you today's access record, if you want to have current month's usage record ./nm-data-usage -m

Access record for May 2009

Connection Date Started Stopped Data IN Data OUT

reliance    08/05/09        12:12:45        12:12:55            0 KB                    0 KB
reliance    08/05/09        12:13:39        12:21:32         7.46 MB                  680 KB
reliance    08/05/09        12:56:25        14:49:45        46.73 MB                 4.95 MB
reliance    08/05/09        17:34:49        17:36:38          804 KB                  104 KB
reliance    08/05/09        17:47:56        17:55:19         3.48 MB                  919 KB
reliance    08/05/09        17:55:22        18:22:40         6.17 MB                 1.57 MB
reliance    08/05/09        18:35:46        18:39:59          821 KB                   77 KB
reliance    08/05/09        19:23:07        01:12:02        55.71 MB                 9.70 MB
reliance    09/05/09        08:22:49        08:37:26         4.18 MB                  996 KB
reliance    09/05/09        08:37:57        09:34:09        13.14 MB                 3.82 MB
reliance    09/05/09        09:34:11        09:46:55        13.86 MB                 3.98 MB
reliance    10/05/09        07:56:21        11:12:18         7.73 MB                 2.63 MB
reliance    10/05/09        12:15:53        12:18:16          944 KB                  222 KB
reliance    10/05/09        12:18:47        12:19:30            5 KB                    0 KB
reliance    10/05/09        12:19:35        12:52:21         4.52 MB                 1.35 MB
reliance    10/05/09        12:52:38        13:08:07         6.03 MB                 1.59 MB
reliance    10/05/09        13:08:09        13:24:03        10.18 MB                 2.60 MB
reliance    11/05/09        19:32:38        21:11:37        14.71 MB                 2.94 MB
reliance    11/05/09        21:12:11        21:13:15          753 KB                   71 KB
reliance    11/05/09        21:22:41        21:33:53          714 KB                   69 KB
reliance    11/05/09        21:41:12        05:41:15        65.19 MB                 9.41 MB
reliance    12/05/09        06:24:25        08:19:35            1 KB                    1 KB
      sm    15/05/09        12:42:55        12:44:34          242 KB                   93 KB

Total data usage : 310.00 MB in current month

I will improve this script to do better query in future.

New release of lekhonee

I am happy to release lekhonee-0.3.1

New release of lekhonee

lekhonee is a desktop client for Wordpress. The new features of this release are:

  • Add Category
  • Spell Check enable/disable
  • Edit last entry

I never blogged about a few last releases, I moved the codebase to PyKDE4. It is using KWallet service to store the password. If you don't want to use kwallet (like you are a gnome user), it will ask you to type-in the details every time.

Download tarball, F-10 rpm (pushed to stable), F-11 rpm

OLPC Pune meet and photo management

This Sunday I went to OLPC Pune meet to give a talk on activity development. The students seem be very enthusiastic. The talk lasted for around 2 hours. Photos can be found here.

On the other side, I was looking for a photo catalogue software which can catalogue my photos on DVD or any other removable media, it should  also allow me to search them based on EXIF data and tags and should show thumbnail(s) in the result. I generally use digikam and gthumb too manage and view the photos. In digikam I never being properly able to catalogue photos on DVD (never tried on the last few updates) and gthumb is too slow in showing the thumbnail or full screen views for the large size photos I take. I prefer gthumb over over digikam to view the photos due to the simpler UI.

Finally decided to write my own app for this, which will not have any editing features, Gimp is the tool I use for editing. Watch this video (3.2MB) and please comment if the  thumbnail creation / viewing is fast or not ?

How one can start learning PyKDE ?

Dear lazyweb,

How one can start learning PyKDE ? For PyQt , reading a few very basic examples given with the source and then reading Qt-help docs seems to be fine. But the KDE libs are much bigger, though one can find a suitable class to work with, how to use that is still not so easy for a newbie.

When it comes to the GUI, it is again not clear to me that which approach one should take , design everything in code ? or one can use qt-designer for that.

Kushal

Summer training 2009

You can find the wiki page here. This year we want to make groups such that there are two students in a group and make them work on any upstream project or  a new project. They should start the work of finding the project ideas within first two weeks of the program.  Comments/suggestions are welcome.

We have added a few buzz words in the poster to attract students. Generally students prefer to go to different small institutions to do summer project where most of the times they pay a good amount to get a certificate. Trying to change the situation slowly.

Thanks to Nicu for the poster.

How to install Soas on your regular box

Soas (Sugar on a Stick) is a LiveUSB system with sugar on it. It is based on Fedora. You can carry it and boot anywhere as you want like any other live system. You can download the ISO from here.

I was using it on a Eee PC (4GB model), suddenly thought of installing it on the system.

The other Fedora based systems have an option on desktop to install on hard disk, but this system is running sugar so no desktop means no such option. From the #fedora-devel I found the command is "liveinst" which is part of anaconda.

So I installed anaconda ( #yum install anaconda ) and then used the command "liveinst" ( without quotes) , this will fire up the installer for you. Then go through like any other installation. After finishing the installation I found X was crashing, tried with many different config but nothing helped. Finally decided to install gdm and gnome on that box ( #yum install @gnome-desktop gdm ),  also installed system-switch-displaymanager using which I changed the display manager to gdm. Next task was to change the init to 5 in inittab. Rebooted and found gdm , chose "sugar" as the desktop option and logged in :)

If you want any help come to #sugar on freenode.

Some updates

Took some nice vacation from IRC in the last week. Now back on track again. In the current todo list:

  • Implementing the Jukebox ideas
  • Work on more PyQt videos
Also found the third eye: Can you find me in that ?

The Eye